Newtown to the media: You're making this nightmare worse

NEWTOWN - "Enough is enough." That's how one local woman summed up the weird and terrible media spectacle that has overtaken her once sleepy hometown.

As Newtowners gathered in shock to comfort one another after a 20-year-old resident went on a shooting spree that killed 20 children and six women at Sandy Hook Elementary School, they also traded curiosities about the crush of TV trucks and notebook-toting reporters that swarmed their usually quiet community.

"I turn on the TV and Anderson Cooper was on my street," said a man to his lunch companions at the General Store on Main Street Monday afternoon.

In a tavern on Queen Street, a group clustered around a half-eaten pepperoni pizza swapped stories about how TV reporters were mispronouncing everything from their neighbors' names to the name of the town itself. (Say it how it's spelled, as though it were two words: New Town.)

But the intense international media attention on Newtown is more than an odd nuisance. It's hurting the people of Newtown at a time when their hearts are already broken beyond comprehension, they say. There are "no media" and "no press" signs taped up at various points around Newtown. At least one church strung up yellow caution tape to keep reporters at bay.

The parents of a little boy who darted past the shooter just before his teacher and classmates were slaughtered put up a sign asking people not to ring their doorbell, CNN reported. Every time it rang, they said, their six-year-old son thought the gunman had found him.

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Teri Brunelli, one of the owners of Everything Newtown - a little shop that sells items like Newtown souvenirs, school supplies, key chains, and hand-knit gloves - said she has been harrassed by television crews. Even when Brunelli declined on-camera interviews, TV producers were calling her multiple times late at night to try to convince her, she said.

"Please tell them to just ease up," Brunelli said. "It happened and we're going through it. Just let it be for right now.

Media and traffic jams the downtown of Sandy Hook near the Elementary School. Many area residents were visiting the makeshift memorial at the school's entrance as the community tries to come to grips with the shooting massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. (Peter Casolino)

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A shopper in the store who overheard Brunelli agreed.

"We need you to help us beg people to stop calling the victims," the woman said. "They're in mourning. Someone actually pounded on a friend's door and, literally, they were shouting, 'Someone in this town has to start talking to us, this is our story.' That's how we're being treated."

In the nearby parking lot of Holy Cow Ice Cream, a first responder who didn't want to give his name said that reporters had been rolling their eyes at him, parking on his private property, and acting as though they were entitled to be in Newtown more than he was.

Back on Main Street, where a funeral for six-year-old Jack Pinto was under way, dozens of television cameras across the street from the Honan Funeral Home recorded grieving friends and family as they came and went. It had been a similar scene at Sunday church services the day before.

As one sobbing woman left St. Rose Church after a threat forced police to evacuate grief-stricken churchgoers during Sunday mass, so many reporters began circling her that others - those who simply saw a crowd forming and didn't want to miss something - began running down the sidewalk with video cameras drawn.

For many reporters and onlookers, the thought of intensifying the trauma of an entire town wracked with loss is gut wrenching enough. But there are more treacherous concerns about the influence a media circus wields. The most oft-cited worry is that copycat killers who seek notoriety will be encouraged by the idea that if they commit a heinous crime, the entire world will pay attention.

Three full days after the shooting at Sandy Hook, news organizations are still fixated on the murders there. It's unlikely that focus will wane until the last of a long stream of funerals is over. On Sunday night at the bar My Place, a trio of locals griped to one another about the reporters who were around every corner.

"Reporters are stalking us," one of the men said. "It's like, [expletive] you. Go away. Leave us the [expletive] alone."

Newtowners say they've never seen the single-lane roads in their town so choked with traffic. The media presence is making their town unrecognizable. Only there is something horribly familiar about this new Newtown, a quality that's played out on television too many times.

"Why is this happening?" one of the three bar-goers said to his companions. "You know Columbine? That's Newtown now. When you say you're from Newtown, that's what it will be like."

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